Rationalism
(coming soon) https://www.autostraddle.com/notes-from-a-queer-engineer-science-has-always-been-political-369940/ "The fact is, science is a social activity carried out by human beings with their own sets of biases. ... Despite all this, science is the best process we’ve got to understand our world. Acknowledging its limitations doesn’t invalidate it; if anything, having open discussions about where bias does and does not exist will strengthen it. And that’s something we should all be invested in, because science benefits everyone. ... Skepticism and critical thinking are healthy, but science is under serious attack right now. From anti-vaxxers on the left to climate deniers on the right, science is mistrusted across the political spectrum." Irrationalism For a neurologically irrational person, truth is irrelevant - meaning is conveyed through other means than literal meanings. However, we can be trained to fixate on literality in order to imitate so-called "rational thought". Born crazy. Gol D. Roger I may feel like my identity is best described as a female pirate empress, a mixture of Boa Hancock's lifestyle with Gol D. Roger's ambition/Haki. This irrational belief (based on a fictional reality set in the world of One Piece) may offer me benefits in terms of how I can develop my internal sense of selfhood, but it would present an inconvenience to 'rational thinkers' who find such fictional delusive realities to represent an absence of sanity - and an associated sense of primality, that scares them. It is no coincidence Luffy's family name is Monkey, the Will of D. is primal in an almost ape-like sense. Intuitive and instinctive manifesters of destiny, who appear to have an endless supply of Haki, that grows through adversity rather than shrinks. All of this suggests that I can't function in a neurotypical society so instead, I am forced to accept the identity that others associate with me. The problem with this is that I''' am unable to access this external identity. I can only replicate it through my expectations of what I believe you expect me to do. I can mimic these for months or even decades and I can develop a sense of the sort of person you see me as... but this image is fallible, not the least reason being because my initial assumptions about your expectations have at least as great an influence on our interaction as your actual expectations do. Interactions are composed of '''transactions. Transactionality Implicit to any interaction, whether political, social, economic or cultural, there is a set of transactions. Two people may exchange light-hearted cultural banter about recent events, while also trying to navigate some complex tensions around their relative difference in class and wealth - say between a CEO and his secretary. In such situations, there is not always a clear axis of privilege through which to assess who has 'more power'. * In political (or economic) terms, the CEO surely has the power and needs to be conscious to not abuse it. * In social terms, it is less clear: The CEO may experience heavy marginalisation in this particular society relative to the secretary. (i.e. an autistic black woman who runs a company with an abled white man as a secretary - further levels can overlap and intersect based on sexuality, but regardless of her economic privilege such a woman experiences classist, racist and ableist oppression under her interactions with members of the secretary's social group and he therefore needs to be conscious not to abuse his privilege - even though she holds privilege over him economically!) * In cultural terms, things are even less clear. Our societal position may not reflect any feeling of cultural contentment, and hence people in positions of societal privilege may even crave the cultural freedoms they perceive oppressed minorities to have in terms of things like 'freedom of speech'. Hence, this is often ignored from the perspective of social justice since it cannot be quantified in the way that societal oppressions can. Transactionality can be viewed in this sense as a generalisation of intersectionality, in which the framework of social, political and economic identities and associated oppressions is expanded to also include other perceived transactions of privilege and power that do not necessarily correspond to some structural axis of privilege. Such axes may include "Hot privilege" whereby a person who perceives themselves as much less attractive than a co-worker may feel that that co-worker can abuse their privilege when they complain about how "fat" or "ugly" they look some days. This privilege is related to societal norms of beauty and also ableism in the ways that Disabled bodies are desexualised, however it is not a tangible privilege nor axis of oppression because it is intrinsically subjective. In transactional theories of social relationships, subjective privileges can be evaluated from the perspective of each party to come to some analysis of the relative privilege/power dynamic between two (or more) interacting individuals. Cultural Erasure By denying power structures in society are imbalanced, people in positions of privilege choose to erase the axes of difference in order to erase the associated axis of privilege that they are accused of. i.e. |} __ Category:Philosophy Category:Science Category:Materialism Category:Rationalism